Spending your first anniversary somewhere new
The first anniversary is the one most couples let slip, usually because it lands in the middle of everything the wedding displaced. Here is how to protect it.
A wedding pushes about six months of ordinary life to one side. When it is over, that life comes back all at once — the move, the job, the thing you postponed. Twelve months later the anniversary arrives and there is nothing in the calendar.
Book it before the wedding
The couples who do this well book the first anniversary while they are still planning the wedding, on the same day they book the honeymoon. It costs a deposit and it makes the date immovable.
Go somewhere neither of you has been
There is an argument for returning to the honeymoon destination, and it is a sentimental one. In practice a return trip gets measured against the original and usually loses. A new place gets measured against nothing.
Keep it short and keep it cheap
Three nights is enough. The point is not the scale of the trip but the fact of it — a fixed, annual, non-negotiable interruption to whatever has accumulated. Couples who start this in year one tend to still be doing it in year ten, and by then it has become the thing they would not give up.
